Many existing systems are configured to provide an external device with a session comprising various conversations between software applications of the system and the external device and wherein the external device and the system operate in a client/server mode.
These existing solutions have turn out to be efficient for homogenous environments, i.e, environments wherein the software applications involved in a session use a common protocol.
However, with these existing systems it is particularly difficult to have conversations using different protocols while sharing a common context for the entire session. Most often, the context for a given session must be duplicated for each protocol used by the involved application servers. Such existing solutions consume processing and data storage capabilities. In particular existing systems do not provide efficient solutions to migrate gradually from applications using given protocols to applications using other protocols while sharing the same context.
Additionally, independently of the protocols used by the conversations, when the external device operates in a server mode in regard to the system operating in a client mode, and when the system comprises a number of application servers, it is particularly complex to have all conversations sharing a common session. In existing solutions the system is provided with a dedicated application server configured to merge the queries from the system into the same outbound conversation with the external device. However, these dedicated application servers undergo an important load which decreases the throughput of these existing systems or renders them poorly reliable or complex.
Therefore, a general objective of the present invention is to solve or to limit at least one of the above mentioned shortcomings of the existing solutions.
More particularly, an objective of the present invention is to describe a solution wherein an external device is provided with a unified view of a session comprising heterogeneous conversations that must share a common context.